Shaping the Second New Deal

1. Shaping the Second New Deal Kali Martel

2. Shaping the Second New Deal • Eleanor Roosevelt influenced her husband’s administration to advocate for progressive causes and social justice. • Woman such as America’s first female Cabinet member, Frances Perkins attached to Eleanor Roosevelt and were strong advocates of social reform.

3. “Black Cabinet” • African Americans had an unprecedented voice in this White House. By 1936 at least 50 African Americans held important positions in the New Deal agencies and cabinet-level departments. • Journalists called these officials (who met on Friday evenings at Mary McLeod Bethune’s home) the “black cabinet.” • Eleanor Roosevelt worked tirelessly to put social justice issues at the center of the New Deal agenda.

4. Roosevelt • Roosevelt was drew political lessons from the success of populist demagogues and leftist politicians. • Many Americans who were hit hard by the depression looked to the New Deal for help and social justice. • If that help was not coming, Roosevelt would lose their support. • Middle class Americans wanted security and stability. They were also worried the continued chaos and disorder would continue. • Others with more to lose were frightened by the populist promises of people like Long and Coughlin.

5. The Second New Deal • Long and Coughlin wanted the New Deal to preserve American capitalism. • Roosevelt looked ahead to the presidential election of 1936 and took initiative. • Roosevelt introduced a range of progressive programs aimed at providing, as he said in a 1935 address to Congress, “greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.”

6. “The Big Bill” • The first triumph of the Second New Deal was a law called “the Big Bill.” • The Emergency Relief Appropriation (ERA) Act provided $4 billion in new deficit spending, to establish massive public works programs for the jobless. • The Emergency Relief Appropriation funded programs such as: -the Resettlement Administration -the Rural Electrification Administration -the National Youth Administration -the Works Progress Administration

7. Programs funded by the ERA Act • Resettlement Administration, which settled destitute families and organized rural homestead communities and suburban greenbelt towns for low-income workers. • Rural Electrification Administration, which brought electricity to isolated rural areas. • National Youth Administration, which sponsored work-relief programs for young adults and part-time jobs for students. • Works Progress Administration (WPA) which was the largest and best-known program funded by the ERA!

8. The Works Progress Administration • The WPA which was later renamed the Work Projects Administration, employed more than 8.5 million people. • Its workers built 650,000 miles of highways and roads, 125,000 public buildings, as well as bridges, reservoirs, irrigation systems, sewage treatment plants, parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools throughout the nation. • WPA workers built or renovated schools/hospitals, operated nurseries for preschool children, and taught 1.5 million adults to read and write.

9. WPA Continued • WPA also sponsored many cultural programs, which not only provided employment for artists, musicians, writers, and actors but offered art in myriad forms to the people. • The WPA’s Federal Theater Project brought vaudeville, circus, and theater, including African American and Yiddish plays, to cities and towns across the country. • The Arts Project hired painters and sculptors to teach their crafts in rural schools and commissioned artists to decorate post office walls with murals.

10. WPA Continued • The Federal Music Project employed 15,000 musicians in government-sponsored orchestras, and collected folk songs from around the nation. • The WPA’s Federal Writers Project (FWP), was perhaps the most ambitious of the New Deal’s cultural programs. • FWP hired authors such as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright. • FWP writers created guidebooks for every state and territory, and they wrote about the plain people of the U.S.

11. Federal Writers Project • More than two thousand elderly men and women who had been freed from slavery by the Civil War told their stories to FWP writers “slave narratives” • Life stories of sharecroppers and textile workers were published as These are Our Lives (1939). • Many WPA arts projects were controversial, for many of the WPA artists, musicians, actors, and writers sympathized with the political struggles of workers and farmers. • Critics assailed them as left-wing propaganda, but it was really an attempt to recover the American traditions by celebrating artistically the lives and labor or American plain folk

12. Roosevelt • The WPA was Roosevelt’s short term emergency strategy to address the immediate need of the country after the Depression. • Roosevelt’s long term strategy centered around the second piece of the Second New Deal legislation, the Social Security Act. It was a federal system to provide for the social welfare of it’s citizens. • It gave a Federal Pension System, unemployment compensation to the jobless, aid to dependent children to help needy children in families without fathers.

13. Social Security System • The social security system would save tens of millions of Americans, especially the elderly from lives of poverty. • The Social Security Act had it’s faults but its passage allowed for the economic stability and security of the aged and also significantly helped with the temporarily jobless, dependent children and the disabled.

14. Roosevelt • Roosevelt became the ultimate populist leading up to the 1936 election. He attacked the wealthy, big business and with the Wealth Tax Act imposed additional taxes on the wealthy, on business profits, and the sale of land. • Roosevelt won the 1936 presidential election by a landslide and Democrats won the Senate and House majorities.

15. New Deal Coalition • The “New Deal Coalition” was forged and with it the Democratic Party by virtue of the benefits afforded through the New Deal programs dominated the two-party system and would occupy the White House for most of the next 30 years.